Louis Aston Knight Biography | Oil Paintings

8-3-1873 Paris, FRA - 5-8-1948 New York, USA

Louis Aston Knight was first taught oil painting by his father Daniel Ridgeway Knight, and in1892, at age nineteen, he went to the Academie Julian in Paris for several years, where he studied classical figure oil painting with Tony Robert-Fleury and Jules Lefebvre. Two years later in 1894, Louis Aston Knight had his first painting exhibited at the Paris Salon, the begin of an acclaimed artistic career.

Louis Aston Knight is most famous for his Normandy landscape oil paintings and early on him and his father Daniel Ridgeway Knight understood that there ought to be an essential distinction between their artwork. They reached an informal understanding, Daniel Ridgeway Knight always had one or more figures in his landscapes, whereas Louis Aston Knight never set figures in his oil compositions. His father painted detailed and tighter, Aston Knight had a looser brushstroke and was influenced more by the Impressionists. Louis Aston Knight was not content with painting the action of the streams from the riverbanks, so he would put on a pair of waist-high rubber pants and set up his easel in mid-stream to paint.

Louis Aston Knight was impressed with Claude Monet's gardens and visited him in Giverny a few times, he wanted to create a garden as beautiful as his. Each year, he held a contest and his peasant neighbors who kept the nicest gardens were awarded prizes and would be used as the scenery for his cottage landscape oil paintings.

Louis Aston Knight became well known in the New York art scene and began to do some of his work in the United States. Aston Knight was a favorite of two American presidents, in 1922, President Harding purchased the painting, The Afterglow near Beaumont, to hang in the White House and President Coolidge held a private exhibition of Aston Knights work in the White House. Louis Aston Knight auction record is $110,000, for A Cottage Along a River, sold in 2005.